Let’s give credit where credit is due. When a black man was released by Tennessee after serving 31 years for a rape he didn’t commit, he didn’t walk out of prison empty-handed. The kind government of Tennessee gave him a check for $75 to help him get a fresh start after 31 years. Although he had no ID, he was able to cash the check after a delay of only three months.
Sept 2, 2010. Woman found with gunshot wound to the back of her throat. 2 days later, coroner rules suicide, but then changes it to homicide.
Family disagrees with finding, orders their own autopsy. They seem…skeptical…that their daughter, a young mother with no history or signs of depression, would have shot herself in the back of the throat. I mean, who the fuck does THAT??? Also, she was planning to leave boyfriend.
2nd autopsy notices something missed in 1st autopsy. She had a broken jawbone. Pathologist says most likely cause of the break was a human fist. Authorities are unconvinced, say it’s a suicide.
This is a lie, of coarse. You do not discuss things about the initial autopsy that are not IN the initial autopsy.
Woman, planning to leave boyfriend, has young child and no history of depression, has broken jawbone and was shot through the back of the throat with boyfriend’s gun.
Any reasonable person would see that these are indicative of suicide, right? Well, they are if the boyfriend is a Deputy Sheriff, and the gun was his service weapon.
I do think that this will open the door to baseball hats, top hats and perhaps even propellor beanies, since a hat is a hat is a hat, but frankly as long as they conspicuously display the NYPD insignia, I think damn near any hat should be acceptable.
And I don’t think beards should be verboten in the first place.
So in a rare comment for this thread, I say “Good on you, NYPD!”
Just to clarify: The “throat” is the front of the neck. By “back of the throat” do they mean “back of the neck”? That’s an unusual place to try to aim a suicide shot.
I would also be interested to know how it was determined that the most likely cause of the jaw fracture was a human fist. I’m no pathologist, but I have never heard of knuckle prints or the equivalent.
I’m no pathologist, but I suspect they can tell it was done by blunt force and calculated the force needed to cause a fracture of that magnitude and subsequently determined that it’s approximate to force imparted by a human fist.
Or by falling and hitting a table or the floor after the shot?
I’m not saying she wasn’t murdered, but I don’t think the fractured jaw is necessarily strong evidence that she’d been hit with a fist.
Also, isn’t putting the gun in the mouth considered to be a pretty common and generally more effective way of committing suicide? I’ve read reference to it many times (and seen news video of it once) and wasn’t under the impression that for a person to shoot themselves this way is strange, as her family appears to think.
Well, everyone reasonable knows that you should aim for the brain, but a suicidal person probably isn’t very reasonable. I tried to find statistics on how many people try to slit their wrists the wrong way as a comparison and couldn’t find anything.
I imagine a table edge would have a different break pattern. Additionally, if it was done while she was in the middle of dying, there may be detectable differences in the tissue. On top of that, they can probably tell which way the body fell when it went down.
However, it’s entirely possible she broke her jaw accidentally, then said, “Fuck this life,” and shot herself in the throat.
I believe the idea is to send a bullet simultaneously through the area of the brain at the base of the skull (an action which is known to turn a person off like a light switch) and through the spinal cord as well, both being pretty much certain guarantors of death. Aiming for the brain in other ways has a mixed record of success.
IMO, the movies are responsible for a lot of would-be gun suicides gone tragically wrong, as in the case of those who place a shotgun under their chin and succeed only in blowing their face off, or who try the gun-to-the-temple route and wind up merely blowing out their eyes, after which they not only have the same problems that made them suicidal in the first place, but they’re disfigured and blind on top of it.
All in all, guns are a pretty risky way to try to do yourself in. The odds are fairly good that the effort won’t be successful and you’ll only wind up disfigured and in a lot of pain instead.
I did some Googling around, and I can’t find anything about break patterns from blunt force trauma differing depending on whether they were caused by a fist vs. any other kind.
I did find this, which says that most of the jaw fractures not caused by a vehicular accident were caused by assault, but that’s not the same thing as saying that it was likely caused by a human fist.
If the idea is that her cop boyfriend knocked her out with a punch and then shot her in the mouth, did he have any damage to his hand? I know this was five years ago, but he was investigated almost immediately - he was the one who called 911 when she was shot.
I’m obviously in no expert in blunt force trauma, but it seems eminently possible to break a bone without splitting the skin. And if she was killed directly afterwards, swelling and bruising wouldn’t have happened. But that’s all just conjecture on my part.
Here is another article with a third pathologist discussing the findings of the first two. Long story short: it could go either way.
Until cop start going to FMITA prison for protecting the criminal activity of other cops, this shit won’t stop. Why the fuck would it?
I don’t agree with it but I can understand how police solidarity might have started. Cops are put in life and death situations all the time and an error or a misjudgment can land a cop in jail. But protecting the off duty activity of officers against innocent civilians is really hard to reationalize. Its a good thin the victim is a white female, justice is much more likely in a case like this.